


The Best-Laid Plans (I)

by Cerdic519



Series: Elementary CLX [2]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Victorian, M/M, Season 3 Finale, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 20:59:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10395963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerdic519/pseuds/Cerdic519
Summary: The small matter of how one Dean Winchester got from Hell to being on a train passing through the village of Appleford in Berkshire, England.In the year 1874.With an Angel of Thursday sat opposite him.No, not Castiel.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MelodyofWings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelodyofWings/gifts).



“Oh.... flip!”

Even where you are the Supreme Being, there are some things that are still beyond you. Besides, the chance of anything going wrong during this meticulously-planned rescue mission had been most precisely calculated as being infinitesimally small. Nanoscopic. A zillion to one.

Trouble is, given enough time, even the zillion to one things happened sooner or later. Or in this case, as of a few seconds ago, when there had been the faint, unmistakable and utterly horrible sound of reality changing itself without first asking permission.

God stared along His bookshelf. To most people it looked the sort of thing one would find at IKEA, and then spend several hours failing to put together before employing the services of someone who charged several times what the thing had cost in the first place. It was, however, inadvisable to look away from the centre of the thing too rapidly, as the edges had a habit of disappearing into other dimensions, and taking the viewer's sanity with them. And right in the middle of the top shelf, there was a small, gaping (and still smoking) hole. God turned to His HD-TV from which a bolt of energy had just shot out and caused said hole, before dragging the book had been there back into... well, That Place.

“Flip!” He said again.

“Is something wrong, dear heart?” Mrs. God asked, walking into the room. She stared at the gap in the shelf, then at the still-smoking screen, where the image was a hellish mixture of red and black. Her face fell.

“Oopsie!”

“Indeed”, Her husband intoned. “Oopsie!”

“What happened?” She asked.

“One of the boys in the distraction mission somehow managed to get all the way to the Righteous Man and rescue him”, He said heavily. “When he got attacked, he lashed out.”

She frowned.

“How could that happen?” She wondered. “Besides, I thought your screen was proof against everything except.... oh.”

He nodded. She had got it.

“Everything except the sort of power surge you get when you have two True Mates meeting for the first time”, He said. 

“Who was it?” She asked. 

“Castiel.”

“Ooo, he's such a cutie!” She twittered. 

God only narrowly resisted the urge to roll His eyes. The annoying this was that She was right. Other angels appeared in their true form and inspired dread and terror; only Castiel could incite people to pat the three-headed monster that had shown up from somewhere, and offer him food and drink. Even to a Supreme Being, it was quite frankly a mystery.

“He's gone and done it again”, God grumbled. “The boys had it all set up that Michael would use their little distraction to rescue the Righteous Man, and fight his way through Purgatory with him before bringing him back to life on earth. Instead.....”

He gazed balefully at the shelf. She followed His gaze, and sniggered.

“We'll have to get another 'Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes'”, She said. “Our little scruffian finding his True Mate seems to have destroyed the original.”

Her husband sighed.

“It is rather more serious than that”, He said heavily. 

“How so, dearest?”

“Our Angel of Thursday has somehow transported both himself and the Righteous Man back to the Victorian England of Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle”, He said heavily. 

“But that was a work of fiction”, She pointed out.

“ _Was_ being the operative word in that sentence”, He sighed. 

“Can you bring them back?” She asked. He shook His head.

“It would be too risky”, He said. “If I tried, it would allow the demons to use the link I would create to access earth, and possibly even Heaven. No, they will just have to live their lives as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, die of old age, and then we can sort our Angel of Thursday's latest mess out.”

“I think that handsome Dean Winchester would make a fine Sherlock”, She said, not at all simpering. Her husband chuckled.

“It is Mr. Grumpy Cat who is the great detective”, He said, “and the man who kills for a living is now a doctor. Ye Go.... well, this is going to be a disaster.”

He moved to press a button on His desk, but had second thoughts. His secretary need not know everything. Instead He merely concentrated, trying to ignore His wife returning with a dustpan and brush. Moments later, a brown-winged angel appeared in front of Him.

“Sasha”, He smiled. “I have a special commission for you......”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean is in hell... except he's suddenly in Berkshire, England, on a freakin' train!

Dean Winchester was a hunter, and as such, he had survived as long as he had done by being strictly logical. So he knew that there had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation just why he was torturing the eternally damned in Hell one minute, and was sat in an old-style railway carriage the next. Yup, a perfectly reasonable explanation.

It would come to him. And why the hell was he wearing this ridiculous suit and jacket get up? He looked like some git in a period drama. And he felt.... younger?

He looked around the compartment, which was not only empty but a lot wider than he would have thought for even an old train. There was no corridor through to the ones next to it, and like his clothes, the whole set-up looked plain _old_. Some engraving on the mirrors proclaimed him to be on something called 'The Great Western Railway', which meant bugger all to him. He gazed into the mirror, and sure enough, his face was that of someone at least a decade younger than when he had died. 

He began to have a bad feeling as to when, if not where, he might have ended up. Seeing some smoke drifting by outside the window , he slid the small upper part open and cautiously poked his head out. Sure enough, there was a green steam locomotive a little way ahead, pulling a rake of brown coaches along at a respectable whack. So, a train. What the fuck was he doing on a train?

“Hello, Dean.”

He yelped in surprise, and ignominiously banged his head on the window-frame before pulling in to see that he was no longer alone in the compartment. A nondescript fellow of about his own age, with untidy dark curly hair and dressed in similar clothes to his own, had materialized across from him. Dean felt instinctively for Ruby's knife, and uttered a silent curse when he found it wasn't there. Just his luck.

“Who the hell are you?” he growled.

“Not hell, Heaven”, the man corrected. “My name is Sachiel.”

“What sort of a name is that?” Dean demanded.

“I am an Angel of the Lord, Dean.”

Some distant memory flickered on the edge of the hunter's consciousness, but was gone before he could reach it. He started suspiciously at the figure in front of him.

“Oh yeah?” he said warily. “Prove it!”

The man smiled, then seemed to concentrate for a moment. The next instant the compartment, which had seemed large enough with its eight comfortable padded seats, was full of wings, two huge dark and feathery appendages coming from the man's – the angel's back. Dean gulped, and the wings vanished as if they had never been.

“Suppose I believe you”, the hunter said warily, thinking he didn't really have much choice after that little display. “What're you doing here? Come to that, what the fuck am I doing here?”

“I share my tasks as Angel of Thursday with my brother, Castiel”, the angel said. “He was one of a rescue party sent to extricate you from Hell. In the natural way that these things are ordered, he was part of the distraction in the overall mission to rescue you; the Archangel Michael was meant to sweep in and do the actual deed. Regretfully however, dear Castiel has a habit of messing things up. That asteroid that did for the dinosaurs – very careless of him. Our Father was Most Upset.”

“This 'Castiel' wasn't supposed to rescue me?” Dean asked, before remembering something else. “Hey, y'all left me there for forty fucking years!”

“They had to break you before we could come”, the angel said, as if it was obvious. Dean scowled. “Our Father is a traditionalist, and would not authorize even the distraction until that had happened. Unfortunately just after Castiel got to you, some of the demons counter-attacked. He lashed out, and his power crossed several dimensions and drew in a book, then contrived to transport you and him both back some one hundred and fifty years to when that book was set. Quite an impressive foul-up, even by his standards.”

Dean blinked. At least Hell had been simple, if horrible. This was making his head hurt.

“So where the fuck am I?” he asked.

“We are currently passing through a railway station called Appleford Halt, in the county of Berkshire, England.”

“Fucking England?” Dean did not shriek (he may, however, have raised his voice just a little).

“Calm down, Dean”, the angel said serenely. 

“Calm down?” Dean snapped. “You're not the one who's been sent several thousand miles and God only knows how far back in time to bloody England! What am I doing here?”

“You are now in the year 1874”, the angel said. “Have you ever read the stories of a fictional detective called Mr. Sherlock Holmes, written by a Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle? They are scribed in the person of Holmes' friend and associate, Doctor John Watson.”

“I haven't”, Dean said, “but Sammy liked them when he was younger. Still does, I suppose. Why?”

The angel's smile was unnerving, and Dean could guess the answer.

“Hell no!”

“Heaven yes!" the angel grinned. “You are Doctor John Watson, and you are on the way to your first encounter with a soon to be famous consulting detective, in the city of Oxford. You have six more years of studying ahead of you, and your friend James Stamford, who shares a room at the college with the aforementioned Mr. Holmes, has invited you there for three weeks peace and quiet before you settle in London for good.”

“Oxford, the university place?”

“Yes”, the angel said. “I shall fill you in with some more background. You were born on January the twenty-fourth, 1852, so you are twenty-two years of age. You come from a small village called Belford in Northumberland, in the North of England. Your mother was Mary Winchester, née Campbell, and your father Jeffrey Watson; they are both deceased. Your younger brother Samuel was born in 1856.....”

“I still have Sammy?” Dean asked, cheering up.

If he had been more alert, he might have noticed the slight pause before the angel's answer.

“You have most of the people from your old – well, your future - life”, he said. “Your brother is studying to be a lawyer in Edinburgh, Scotland, some four hundred miles from London, so you will see him only rarely, although he is destined for a happier life this time around. He will even have his Jessica. To continue, your father died six years ago, whereon your mother came into an inheritance from her own father, a Mr. Jameson Campbell, who had predeceased her.”

“Why only then?” Dean asked.

“Because in Victorian England, it is still the law that the property of the wife becomes automatically that of her husband”, the angel explained, “and your grandfather rightly judged your father's character as being unfit to have that money. He therefore left his money in trust to his daughter until her husband had passed, and in the years subsequent to Mr. Campbell's death, it was administered by his friend and colleague, Sir Charles Holmes, Sherlock's father. It was through his help that you obtained the place at St. Bartholomew's, the famous London hospital. You have always wanted to be a doctor.”

“Why is your brother – this Castiel - here anyway?” Dean asked.

“Time travel is highly unpredictable”, the angel said. “It is easy to do, but correcting it is... problematical.”

Dean's eyes narrowed. He did not like that last word one little bit.

“So how do I get back to the twenty-first century?” he asked.

“You do not.”

Okay, that was blunt. The hunter – no, apparently the doctor - stared at the angel for nearly a whole minute before he found his voice.

“What the fuck do you mean, 'You do not'?” he asked. “I can't survive in this time. Hell, no phones, no TV, no cars – and these damn clothes itch like crazy! It'll be like being a bloody caveman, but with worse dress sense!”

The angel smiled and shook his head, then leaned forward to pat Dean on the shoulder.

“You will cope”, he said confidently, his hand remaining on the hunter's shoulder (Dean had another vague recollection that that gesture was familiar in some way, but again he could not recall it). “Our Father has managed to ensure that Castiel too has his own past, and no memory of you, Hell or everything before – or more accurately, to come. That will remain the case until he has lived his life and died a natural death. And now, it is your turn.”

Dean opened his mouth to object, but the bastard must have done a whammy on him. His vision faded, and he slumped back into the comfortable seat. The angel smiled, then concentrated.

“Inputting backstory.....”


End file.
